Bible of the Ethiopians

You've been reading an incomplete Bible your entire life. The world's oldest Christian church has been quietly guarding the rest of it for fifteen centuries. While Western Christianity debated which books belonged in Scripture, the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church simply kept reading all of them - eighty-one books, preserved in the ancient language of Ge'ez, including texts the Dead Sea Scrolls proved were central to the world that produced Jesus. The Book of Enoch. The Book of Jubilees. Three uniquely Ethiopian books of the Maccabees. Apostolic books of church order embedded within the New Testament itself. Texts that survived, intact and canonical, only in Ethiopia - because nobody told these monks they were supposed to stop reading them. This is the book that has never been written: the first comprehensive English-language study of the world's largest Christian Bible. How the canon was formed, what makes it different, why it matters - and what it reveals about the history of Scripture that every other tradition has quietly agreed not to discuss. You will learn why Martin Luther declared full communion with the Ethiopian church in 1534 and why that encounter was erased from Protestant history. Why the Dead Sea Scrolls vindicated what Ethiopia canonized a thousand years earlier. Why the Garima Gospels - radiocarbon dated to 390 CE, never removed from their Tigrayan monastery - are the oldest illustrated Christian manuscripts on earth. And why the number eighty-one is not an accident. The Ethiopian church has been waiting, patiently, for the rest of Christianity to catch up. Read this book.

The New Testament quotes a book most Christians have never read. The Dead Sea Scrolls proved it was real. One church never stopped reading it. The letter of Jude quotes 1 Enoch by name as prophetic Scripture. Eleven Aramaic manuscripts of the same text were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. And yet most Christians have never heard of it - because the Western church gradually stopped copying it, and the text disappeared. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church never stopped. For fifteen centuries, the monks of Tigray and Lalibela and Lake Tana have read 1 Enoch as the fourteenth book of their Old Testament - canonical Scripture, chanted in the liturgy, integrated into a theology more coherent with the New Testament's own world than the traditions that excluded it. What you have been reading the New Testament without: the pre-existent Son of Man whose portrait in the Similitudes provides the most precise background for Jesus's most frequent self-designation. The canonical definition of Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, and Uriel. The imprisoned spirits of 1 Peter 3:19 - the bound Watchers of 1 Enoch 10. The social ethics standing behind the Lucan Beatitudes and James 5. The Ethiopian church has been right about 1 Enoch for fifteen centuries. The Dead Sea Scrolls agreed. The New Testament agreed. The rest of the world is finally catching up.